Since I imagine there will be a lot more righteous indignation I wanted to jump out and ask what people think of "The Anarchist Cookbook" which no one brought up during the debate this morning.

The Anarchist Cookbook is mostly hippie claptrap.

Seriously, a third of the book or so is about drugs and how to make them, use them, and which ones are "better" than others. The rest is largely basic self-defense, survivalist tips, with a sprinkling of controversial advice.

It may have been controversial at the time, but in the internet age it's nothing.

The analogy is that it is a how-to on committing crimes (making drugs, bombs, booby-traps, etc). I think the comparison stands.

The Anarchist's Cookbook is one of the things that the first amendment is deliberately designed to protect. Likewise, there is nothing illegal about this manual. It is what it is. Frankly, the manual can be used as training material for police and the FBI.

Just because it deals with something you find distasteful, and gives instructions on how to carry out illegal activity does not make the manual itself illegal.

Describing how a person could commit a crime (or giving a detailed description of the commission of a crime) is different from soliciting someone to commit a crime.

Can depend on the context and intent, though. For instance, if I write a detailed description of how to hack Bank of America ATMs and post it on Gizmodo as a general interest tech news story, that's protected speech. On the other hand, if I write the same detailed description and give it exclusively, and secretly, to a guy I know is mobbed up, well, that's potentially conspiracy to commit larceny.

I see this child molestation thing the same way. If this how-to guide was posted for all the world to see, then it's protected speech. If it was posted in an invitation-only, password-protected forum for pedophiles, then it may be part of a criminal conspiracy.

Didn't we have this argument before on some educational pamphlets that the state of California was passing out on how to use Drugs safely or something like that?
I seem to remember an argument being made about how it could have been enough to push someone over the edge who might otherwise have never hopped the fence...
Perhaps similar in this case? Someone gets a manual and sees how "easy" it is to commit the crime with a how-to on details they never even thought of before.

Didn't we have this argument before on some educational pamphlets that the state of California was passing out on how to use Drugs safely or something like that?
I seem to remember an argument being made about how it could have been enough to push someone over the edge who might otherwise have never hopped the fence...
Perhaps similar in this case? Someone gets a manual and sees how "easy" it is to commit the crime with a how-to on details they never even thought of before.

Free speech protections aren't going to prevent you from being lynched by your neighbors.

Only in places with ineffective law enforcement.

As has been said, if providing the details of how to commit crimes well was a crime, most authors of criminology textbooks, criminology classes, and most murder mystery writers would be out of jobs and in jail.

You have way too much faith in law enforcement if you think any department can protect you from your neighbors.

It just occurred to me that most science textbooks in general would be illegal. A chemistry textbook could be construed as providing details on how to cook meth, for example.

Neighbors won't attack you when they know they'd get arrested later.